Brief items
Security
Security quotes of the week
Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.
— Bruce
Schneier
An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National
Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted
set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close
U.S. allies.
— Joseph
Menn for Reuters
In interviews and emails seen by Reuters, academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 4.14-rc2, released on September 24. Linus said: "Nothing stands out, although hopefully we've gotten over all the x86 ASID issues. Knock wood."
Stable updates: none have been released in the last week. The 4.13.4, 4.9.52, 4.4.89, and 3.18.72 updates are in the review process (and overdue) as of this writing.
Quote of the week
And yes some of the files are utterly horrible to read and not
anything close to kernel coding style standards. But that's the
point, they're essentially gospel from hw engineers that happens to
be parseable by gcc.
— Daniel Vetter green-lights AMD's display core
Distributions
Announcing Intel Clear Containers 3.0
The Clear Containers team at Intel has announced the release of Clear Containers 3.0. "Completely rewritten and refactored, Clear Containers 3.0 uses Go language instead of C and introduces many new components and features. The 3.0 release of Clear Containers brings better integration into the container ecosystem and an ability to leverage code used for namespace based containers."
Development
Facebook relicenses several projects
Facebook has announced that the React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js projects will be moving to the MIT license. This is, of course, a somewhat delayed reaction to the controversy over the "BSD+patent" license previously applied to those projects. "This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community."
Firefox takes a Quantum leap forward with new developer edition (ars technica)
Ars technica takes a look at the Firefox 57 developer edition. "More important, but less immediately visible, is that Firefox 57 has received a ton of performance enhancement. Project Quantum has several strands to it: Mozilla has developed a new CSS engine, Stylo, that parses CSS files, applies the styling rules to elements on the page, and calculates object sizes and positions. There is also a new rendering engine, WebRender, that uses the GPU to draw the (styled) elements of the page. Compositor combines the individual rendered elements and builds them into a complete page, while Quantum DOM changes how JavaScript runs, especially in background tabs. As well as this new development, there's a final part, Quantum Flow, which has focused on fixing bugs and adding optimizations to those parts of the browser that aren't being redeveloped. WebRender is due to arrive in Firefox 59, but the rest of Quantum is part of Firefox 57."
GitLab 10.0 Released
GitLab 10.0 has been released. "With every monthly release of GitLab, we introduce new capabilities and improve our existing features. GitLab 10.0 is no exception and includes numerous new additions, such as the ability to automatically resolve outdated merge request discussions, improvements to subgroups, and an API for Wiki thanks to a contribution from our open source community."
Samba 4.7.0 released
The Samba 4.7.0 release is out. New features include whole DB read locks (a reliability improvement), support for running Active Directory domain controllers using MIT Kerberos, detailed audit trails for authentication and authorization activities, a multi-process LDAP server, better read-only domain controller support, and more. See the release notes for details.
Open Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Big Data Processing and Serving Engine
Oath, parent company of Yahoo, has announced that it has released Vespa as an open source project on GitHub. "Building applications increasingly means dealing with huge amounts of data. While developers can use the the Hadoop stack to store and batch process big data, and Storm to stream-process data, these technologies do not help with serving results to end users. Serving is challenging at large scale, especially when it is necessary to make computations quickly over data while a user is waiting, as with applications that feature search, recommendation, and personalization. By releasing Vespa, we are making it easy for anyone to build applications that can compute responses to user requests, over large datasets, at real time and at internet scale – capabilities that up until now, have been within reach of only a few large companies." (Thanks to Paul Wise)
Development quotes of the week
Controlling Magit feels like putting on a performance. Move your fingers quickly enough, and you’ll be rebasing faster than the eye can see. But if your crowd is not impressed yet, you move on to tagging, cherry-picking, rewriting, reflogging until they’re left staring unblinkingly at your monitor, their jaws unknowingly open in awe.
— Artur Malabarba
I’d say the final thing I’d throw out about sustainability is if your project isn’t comprised of people who are nice to each other, it’s not going to be very sustainable. Even the smartest people, even the most enthusiastic people will burn out if the dynamic in the community is very harsh, or if every time a good idea is brought up you hear crickets or somebody talks it down. You need to be nice to each other on an open source project in order to have any hope of being sustainable.
— Brian
Behlendorf
You are one with the Gopher. You feel its glorious chi, and cry when you realize its mercy for allowing your to write code in such a majestic language.
— Daisuke
Maki
Whether or not users care is only relevant to a certain point. Arguably, the biggest benefit of convergence lies in the efficiency of the development process, especially when multiple devices are involved. It doesn’t actually matter all that much if users are going to plug their mouse and keyboard into a phone and use it as a desktop device. Already today, users expect touchscreen to just work, even on laptops, users already expect the convertible being usable when the keyboard is flipped away or unplugged, users already expect to plug a 4K into their 1024×768 resolution laptop and the UI neither becoming unreadable or comically large.
— Sebastian Kügler
In short: There really is no way around a large degree of convergence in Plasma (and similar products).
Miscellaneous
Red Hat's new patent promise
Red Hat has announced an update to its patent promise, wherein the company says it will not enforce its patents against anybody who might be infringing them with open-source software. The new version expands the promise to all software covered by an OSI-approved license, including permissive licenses. The attached FAQ notes that Red Hat now possesses over 2,000 patents.Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced that Microsoft has joined the organization as a Premium Sponsor. "Microsoft's history with the OSI dates back to 2005 with the submission of the Microsoft Community License, then again in August of 2007 with the submission of the Microsoft Permissive License. For many in the open source software community, it was Microsoft's release of .NET in 2014 under an open source license that may have first caught their attention. Microsoft has increasingly participated in open source projects and communities as users, contributors, and creators, and has released even more open source products like Visual Studio Code and Typescript."
Page editor: Jake Edge
Next page:
Announcements>>